Open Circuit

As data centers, factories, and electrification push growth to unprecedented heights, customers are looking for greater control over their energy use. But the traditional one-size-fits-all approach falls short for customers wanting to know which energy choices will benefit them most, and how those choices will impact their bills. In this third episode of Bidgely’s four-part series, Stephen Lacey talks with Kirby Brinlee, director of customer experience at Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Abhay Gupta, CEO at Bidgely. Through their partnership with Bidgely, OG&E learned something surprising about their variable peak pricing program: Customers were shifting their energy use to the wrong hours. Personalized messages and recommendations proved a win-win for the utility and their customers. Flexibility programs became more reliable resources for grid planners, and customers learned how to keep their costs low.  Kirby and Abhay discuss how load growth is reshaping the utility-customer relationship, why personalization matters, and how AI is helping OG&E give more power to customers. OG&E’s experience reveals how AI can unlock more sophisticated demand flexibility by finding the right customers, accurately measuring energy usage, and building stronger customer relationships.  This is a partner episode, brought to you by ⁠Bidgely⁠. This is the third episode in our series with Bidgely exploring how utilities are deploying purpose-built AI to solve their most pressing challenges. Tune in to the other episodes: How APS dove headfirst into AI Turning customer data into grid intelligence

Electricity prices have become a central storyline in upcoming U.S. elections. All over the country, Americans are finding it harder to pay their bills, and they’re getting increasingly cynical about utilities and data centers.  While governors are caught in the middle of this voter anger, there’s a group of key decisionmakers that are often missed: the 200 regulators that oversee tens of billions of dollars in utility spending. In this episode, Charles Hua, the founder and executive director of PowerLines, walks through why that gap matters right now.  Utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases last year. And PowerLines’ newest research found that utilities are planning $1.4 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030. Hua dissects what is driving that spending, arguing that the real drivers of higher bills predate the data center boom.  Still, the data center effect is real. And state-level regulators are struggling to balance the need for economic development with the massive rate increase requests that utilities are throwing at them.  So how will electricity affordability shape elections? And, most importantly, how will it shape the way we pay for needed grid upgrades? This conversation was recorded live at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Virtual power plants are having a moment. Suddenly, this once-niche solution for the power sector is breaking into mainstream discourse. The convergence of sudden load growth, aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and electricity inflation is turning distributed resources into must-deploy assets.  At the state level, VPPs are becoming a go-to tool for making electricity more affordable. They’re championed as one of the only solutions that can open up enough capacity to support load growth over the next three years. But at a moment of historic utility spending, VPPs can still feel like a round peg in a square hole. Utilities and regulators treat them as a novelty, and market rules are not designed to unlock their potential. So what still needs to happen to leverage the true potential of this resource? This week, we have a live episode recorded from Cpower’s GridFuture conference in Jersey City. Stephen is joined by David Visneau, head of demand response and VPPs at NRG Business; Ken Schisler, senior director of growth & policy at NRG; and Mathew Sachs, chief strategy Officer at CPower​ ​. They dive into the unique tailwinds for the market, the regulatory constraints, the state-level policy activity, and some predictions about where we're headed. This episode was produced in partnership with CPower. 

We're on vacation through the end of August, so this week we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint. Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage. But inexpensive, multi-day storage will still be critical for backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid.  Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron, Form is creating low-cost, multi-day storage that competes directly with natural gas peaker plants.  Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, has spent over two decades in the battery industry, including building Tesla’s storage business. At Form, he’s leading the charge to bring these "E-peakers" to utilities across the country. The company recently achieved a major milestone: completing a one-million-square-foot factory on the site of an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia. In this episode, Mateo talks with host Lara Pierpoint about the grueling realities of scaling up manufacturing, why they chose to build in West Virginia, using AI to drive material science discovery, and the immense logistical challenges of building physical infrastructure.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Arbor Energy is betting that smaller, modular turbines can solve problems the conventional generation model was never designed for. Arbor Energy was founded with an unusual idea: take technologies from rocket engines and use them to make carbon-negative power plants. Today, the market has radically changed. Demand for turbines is exploding, the supply chain is jammed, and data centers need power on rapid timelines. Suddenly, Arbor’s 3D-printed turbine is a potential answer to the power bottleneck. In this episode, Stephen Lacey talks with Arbor CEO and co-founder Brad Hartwig, a former SpaceX engineer who found his calling in power generation. They explore how Arbor is adapting rocket technologies for power generation, how additive manufacturing could unlock new turbine supply chains, and why the company believes cleaner power solutions are critical for community acceptance. Can rocket engineering help reinvent the way we build power plants? This episode was produced in partnership with Arbor Energy. 

After Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, everyone thought prices would hit historic highs. But they didn't. Why? The answer is less about market resiliency, and more about two major government interventions. The U.S. intervened using a central banking model, and China intervened with a top-down government approach. James Gutman, head of research at Abaxx Technologies, joins us this week to discuss how these two interventions influenced global oil flows, and why China emerged as a clear winner. Gutman wrote about the Chinese and American strategies on his substack, Arcs and Angles. We look at how China cut crude oil imports and leaned on a decade of investment in electric vehicles, high-speed rail, and coal-to-liquids to defer demand. As China starts to come back into the market, the country is now operating at a position of strength. We also discuss the U.S. model, which leaned on strategic oil reserves to moderate prices in a way that mirrors central banking. Gutman argues that this “central bank of molecules” model worked, but only for so long. And he worries about how it will get used in the future. Finally, we ask how both of these approaches could get used again in other industries like critical minerals or equipment manufacturing. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

The showdown over data centers is taking a new turn. This week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a data center pause in order to audit how they’ll impact water supplies and the power grid. This comes weeks after New York issued a moratorium. Not long ago, Governor Abbott was declaring Texas the center of the AI boom. But with his re-election bid under threat, he’s now responding to the radical shift in anti-data center sentiment. So what will this mean for other states? And more importantly, will states use their pauses to find creative ways to upgrade grids and deploy clean energy? Then, the end of the corporate net-zero era. AI load growth is blowing up climate goals in real time and tech companies are scrambling to explain their emissions increases. Meanwhile, many of the biggest corporate players are walking away from their targets. But could this actually be a good thing for corporate decarbonization? We’ll look at more effective ways for companies to accelerate clean solutions. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, where New Mexico's energy future is shaped. Join industry leaders, policy makers, researchers, and innovators at Building an Advanced Energy Ecosystem, September 14-16 in Albuquerque. Visit nmwomenlead.org/registration and use promo code CIRCUIT to save 10% on registration. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

It's been almost a decade since the “Electrify Everything” movement kicked off. And guess what? We aren't electrifying everything. We're seeing strong growth in electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction cooktops. But we're still trapped inside a system that makes the electric choice harder to make. And nowhere is that more obvious than with heat pumps.  Every eight seconds in the US, an HVAC contractor installs an air conditioner that has only one mode: cooling. That one decision locks in fossil fuel heating for the next 15 to 20 years. This week, we're joined by Nate Adams, known as the House Whisperer, to unpack the three-part series he wrote for Latitude Media on what's actually holding heat pump adoption back. Nate argues the fix isn't more rebates or bigger subsidies for homeowners. Rather, it's making it easier for upstream players to make and stock two-way ACs. We dig into the emergency replacement trap, the importance of hybrid systems, how heat pumps got politically coded, and why leading with comfort — not climate — is the winning pitch. We also talk about Nate’s immersive, fully electrified Airbnbs. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Nate Adams. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.  Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built. In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by Jessica Bailey, Global Head of Infrastructure at Nuveen, an institutional giant with over $1.4 trillion in assets under management. Jessica directs $40 billion in infrastructure investments and discusses how the collision of the energy transition, digitalization, and aging grid systems is creating an unprecedented investment landscape. Jessica shares her unique journey from climate philanthropy at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to pioneering C-PACE financing. She also explains the financing structures needed to scale domestic manufacturing, why economic realities are beginning to override political gridlock, and why the biggest check on AI growth won't be capital, but could be energy and community pushback. Subscribe to Critical Capital on Apple, Spotify, or any podcast platform.

A major fault line runs through the data center debate: how many will actually go off-grid? There’s a lot of enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for breaking free from the grid. But even the companies pushing hardest for off-grid projects now admit they want a grid connection eventually. So how much behind-the-meter power will actually get built in the next few years? And what fills it? SemiAnalysis, the influential chip and infrastructure research firm, recently projected over 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter power at U.S. data centers by 2028, most of it gas turbines, reciprocating engines, and fuel cells. This week, Tim Hade, SVP at Voltus, joins the show to interrogate that forecast. He thinks that timeline is a fantasy, and that the real story for the next three to five years is load flexibility driven by batteries. We dig into the SemiAnalysis numbers, the disagreement over how much headroom the grid has, and whether declining marginal value for batteries undercuts the case for storage. We close with a new framework from Rhodium Group that scores how these choices help or hurt the energy transition.  Read Jigar’s ode to Lorenzo Kristov, mentioned in the show. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and special guest Tim Hade. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey.  Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Utilities across the country are increasingly turning to time-of-day rates as electricity demand grows and delivery costs rise. But a harder challenge is giving customers the tools to save money under those new rates. In this second episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Lou DeBrino, Vice President of Customer Operations at PSEG Long Island, and Ted Nielsen, Chief Product Officer at Bidgely. As PSEG Long Island prepared to transition more than 900,000 residential customers onto time-of-day rates, success depended on building trust, improving transparency, and helping customers understand exactly where their energy dollars were going. Lou and Ted explain how appliance-level energy intelligence transformed that effort. What started as a way to explain electric bills evolved into a broader customer engagement platform supporting call center operations, targeted efficiency programs, EV adoption, demand-side management, and long-term grid planning.  Along the way, they discuss why the future of utility AI depends on building stronger relationships between utilities and their customers. Learn more about how Bidgely works with utilities through its UtilityAI platform. This is the second episode in our four-part series with Bidgely exploring how utilities are deploying purpose-built AI to solve their most pressing challenges. Tune in to the other episodes: How APS dove headfirst into AI Empowering utility customers with demand flexibility, with Oklahoma Gas & Electric

America turned 250 years old last week. While local leaders were busy organizing parades, re-enactments, and flyovers, grid operators and emergency officials were dealing with something else entirely: a heat dome settled over the eastern U.S.  Nearly 200 million people were under extreme heat warnings, the national parade in Washington was canceled, and PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, hit a new all-time demand record. The Energy Department issued emergency orders to keep the lights on. And people living next to data centers wondered: how much diesel pollution would they breathe if all the backup generators kicked on at once. This week, we'll look at two energy stories playing out in response: the top-down effort to manage grids stressed by data centers and extreme weather — including the biggest-ever virtual power plant getting built to take the pressure off. We’ll also look at the bottom-up movement of Americans bolting solar panels to their balconies and backyards. The market for plug-in solar has surged in Pakistan and Germany. Will it add up to something meaningful in the U.S.? And could it play a role in virtual power plants? Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

For 20 years, the blueprint for data centers was simple: find some land, get in line for power, and trust that the utility could deliver. Data centers and power infrastructure got built on separate tracks because the grid had room to spare. That model is gone. Today, with long lead times for equipment, multi-year interconnection queues, and the pressure to bring your own generation, it all has to be sequenced together. And on top of it all, public opinion has radically shifted against data centers, adding new risks. In this episode, recorded live at our Transition-AI conference in April, we hear from two executives navigating all of it: Holly Adams, SVP of Energy at Beale Infrastructure, and Ian Black, SVP and Global Head of Energy at Digital Realty. They cover the similarities between renewables and data centers, the changing definition of "powered land," the evolution of large load tariffs, how community opposition has grown, and the hard questions around bringing your own generation that utilities are betting developers won't solve. Get your ticket to Latitude Media’s Flex Summit in Austin, Texas on October 14-15. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler. Open Circuit is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

AI is about far more than chatbots and copilots. For utilities, the bigger opportunity may be in applying purpose-built models to the operational data from smart meters, customer systems, weather, outages, and grid equipment. In this first episode of a four-part series with Bidgely, Stephen Lacey talks with Venkata Nimmala, Director of Digital Transformation and Enterprise Architecture at Arizona Public Service, and Karthik Moorthy, Chief Growth Officer at Bidgely. APS initially partnered with Bidgely to solve a highly practical customer-service problem: helping call-center agents explain why a customer’s bill had increased. By using appliance-level energy disaggregation, the utility moved beyond generic explanations to identify the likely drivers of higher usage. But the project soon raised a bigger question. How could the same intelligence support a wider range of planning and operational solutions across the utility? Venkat and Karthik explain how APS began bringing Bidgely’s models closer to the utility’s own data environment, creating a foundation for broader experimentation and deployment.  They discuss data sovereignty, centralized AI governance, the difference between buying a point solution and building deeper capabilities, and why AI transformation is ultimately as much about data and operating models as it is about technology. Learn more about how Bidgely works with utilities through its UtilityAI platform. This is the first episode in our four-part series with Bidgely exploring how utilities are deploying purpose-built AI to solve their most pressing challenges. Tune in to the other episodes: Turning customer data into grid intelligence, with PSEG Long Island Empowering utility customers with demand flexibility, with Oklahoma Gas & Electric

For a half century, fusion has been a scientific story playing out in national labs, government research budgets, and peer-reviewed journals. Every so often, a bold claim captures the public's attention, and then leads to disappointment when people realize that limitless energy from the stars is very hard to produce on Earth. But now fusion is evolving into a commercial story. This spring, Commonwealth Fusion Systems became the first fusion company to file a generation interconnection request with PJM. The company has a site in Virginia, customers in Google and Eni, and a timeline that could put power on the grid in the early 2030s. That’s roughly the same window as a conventional power plant built today. The science is far from done, and fusion has burned optimists before. But for the first time, the conversation has shifted from "can this ever work" to "can this work on a timeline that matters for today's grid planning?" This week, we interrogate that timeline with Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

Depending on where you sit, SpaceX is either the greatest industrial company of our time, or a CapEx bonfire that requires a lot of imagination to justify. But either way, the company’s public debut tells us something important about this investment moment: the next technology cycle is not asset-light. It is ambitiously physical. SpaceX is now much more than rockets and launchpads. With xAI inside the company, SpaceX is pitching itself as an AI company, an emerging hyperscaler, a satellite broadband network, and eventually a vertically integrated chip manufacturer, solar manufacturer, power developer, and operator of orbital data centers. In this episode, we tackle some of the energy storylines behind SpaceX’s public debut.  We’ll ask what it means for Elon’s energy master plan, the pathway for powering terawatt-scale compute, and whether it presents an opening for other hard tech energy companies coming out of Elon’s orbit. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. This episode was mixed by Matthew Filler. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

The anger and anxiety over electricity in America is palpable. You can see it in packed utility commission hearings, in protests against companies, and in furious reactions on social media. And you can see it in the polling. Across poll after poll, more people are saying that they can’t afford their bills and they think utilities need to change how they make money. And they are also very cynical about data centers.  So will this be the push utilities need to finally change the way utilities pay for infrastructure? This week, we dig into three indicators. First: 75% of Americans say their home energy costs have gone up, and a quarter of Americans now consider utility bills unaffordable. Second: 86% of California voters said executive pay should be tied to affordability. And third: 71% of Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home, a 49-point swing in less than a year. Julia Hamm, a partner at Ad Hoc Group, joins us to explore how these economic anxieties may shift the electricity economy. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

First, it was a power bottleneck. Then a compute bottleneck. Now, as AI agents burn through tokens faster than anyone predicted, we're back in a compute shortage. Meanwhile, it's getting harder than ever to site and build the data centers to alleviate it. This is shaking up who builds the energy infrastructure to serve it, and how it gets built. This week, we’re diving into the biggest utility deal in American history: NextEra’s attempt to buy Dominion. If it happens, it would combine the biggest renewable energy developer in the US with the utility serving the world's largest concentration of data centers.  What does it mean for their power development strategy? We debate the regulatory path, the power mix question, and who actually benefits. Then we turn to an infrastructure debate. Are we entering a new era of distributed, grid-connected data centers that will overshadow the gigawatt-scale campus model?  And we close with a rapid-fire look at some ideas for solving the compute crunch: Home inference hubs, water heaters that serve AI, and wave-powered data centers. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

A familiar debate is reemerging in US politics: is it helpful or damaging to talk about climate change? It broke into the open when the New York Times published an op-ed from Matthew Huber arguing that Democrats should avoid talking about climate change. His case: climate carries far too much political baggage for working class voters that Democrats are trying to win back. It sparked a conversation over whether "climate hushing" is a savvy political strategy or a dangerous concession. This week, we take the debate head-on. Guest co-host Jane Flegal joins us to talk about the latest version of this argument, and whether dropping the climate frame is a smart tactical pivot. Then we turn to a more fundamental problem. Even if we land on the perfect climate frame, it may not matter if the U.S. can't actually build the infrastructure the transition requires. A sweeping new essay in American Affairs argues that both parties have become functionally obstructionist — and that “ideologically portable” obstruction has become a feature of American governance. We close with a look at an opening in philanthropy. Nan Ransohoff published a piece this month arguing that AI company wealth is about to generate up to $100 billion per year in new philanthropic capital. Do the institutions exist to deploy it? And how much might find its way to climate and energy work? Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Jane Flegal. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Last year, clean energy attracted double the investment of fossil fuels. It's now a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and the dominant source of new capacity in the US. And yet in the 2024 election cycle, the entire renewable energy industry donated just $2.5 million to political campaigns. The oil and gas industry donated $75 million just to elect one man. Now consider crypto. A few years ago, most politicians treated it as a fringe technology at best. And then the crypto industry decided it was done being ignored and attacked. It built a war chest and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024, representing nearly half of all corporate political spending that cycle. As a result, crypto went from regulatory target to political kingmaker in a single election cycle. Clean energy has been a legitimate economic force for over a decade and still gets pushed around Washington. Why? How does an industry that's winning on economics keep losing in politics? This week, we're live from the Prelude Climate Summit, a gathering of the top investors and companies in climate tech. Stephen Lacey is joined by Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of Ripple, who helped engineer crypto's political transformation. He is now deploying that same playbook in service of climate. He’s also joined by Mike Brune, the longest-serving executive director in the Sierra Club's history, who stepped away in 2021 to co-found the Clean Break Fund with Chris — a new climate investment and political initiative. We get into bare knuckle politics, lessons from the crypto industry, when and how we should talk about climate in politics, and the way AI is influencing the conversation.  Open Circuit is produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development.  That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into their backyards. Permits are being denied and projects are stalling. The industry's default response has been to barrel forward and ramp up PR. But Christian Belady thinks that's the wrong diagnosis entirely. Christian spent decades at HP and Microsoft. At Microsoft, he helped build one of the largest data center footprints in the world.  He invented PUE, the efficiency metric that became the industry standard. And now he's arguing that the way out of this community crisis isn't communications, it's engineering.  So how do we make data centers assets to the communities they operate in? Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Data center opposition is now being called “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” In Indiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, voters across the political spectrum are turning sharply against the large campuses powering AI. At least 28 of the 38 states that currently offer tax incentives are weighing whether to roll them back. On this episode of Open Circuit, we dig into what's actually driving the revolt, and why it's more complicated than simple NIMBYism.  Utilities are at the center of the backlash. Governors are increasingly targeting them as anger grows over opaque deals and rising rates. Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro sent a letter to his state's utilities declaring that "the 20th century utility model is broken." We break down what he's actually proposing and what it says about the impossible position governors now find themselves in. Later in the show, Latitude Media senior reporter Maeve Allsup to talk about her reporting on the backlash from Indiana, where a $5 billion data center has run headfirst into decades of broken promises and soaring utility bills. We’ll also take a quick look at PJM's reformed interconnection queue, open for the first time in four years. We’ll look at the dominance of gas, the pullback of renewables, and what it tells us about where grid buildout is actually headed. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

As the oil crisis persists, the world is running on borrowed time and borrowed oil. Inventories are draining, and the pain that started in Asian petrochemical plants and Indian cooking fuel shipments is now spreading west.  Now, the traders who move the world's oil are saying there's a reckoning coming for the rest of the world. This week, we dive into what happens if this keeps going. Does a shock this big finally weaken the world's oil addiction? Or do we just go right back to where we started? We also get into the emerging clean energy storylines: Countries are dusting off their transition plans, Chinese cleantech exports are surging, and Gulf states may pull back on climate tech investing. Then we turn to the world's most hyped data center developer, Fermi America, which raised nearly $750 million promising to build the largest campus ever. The company is now in freefall with no anchor tenant, a departed CEO, and a construction site that looks unchanged from six months ago. What went wrong? Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

What actually kills a clean energy project? It’s not always interconnection delays, permitting, or supply chains. Sometimes, it’s the deal itself. Even after years of development, hundreds of documents, and months of diligence, projects still fall apart late in the process — sometimes just days before closing. Often, it’s because risks aren’t surfaced early enough. The result: capital gets tied up in deals that don’t move forward, developers spend years advancing projects that can’t get financed, and critical information only emerges when it’s almost too late to act on it. In a market defined by policy uncertainty, investors are more selective than ever, and there’s much less tolerance for surprises late in the process. So how do we fix it? In this Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey talks with Rich Deming, founder of CEARTscore and CEO of East Energy Renewables, about why diligence still breaks down, and what it would take to fix it. They discuss how risks get buried across fragmented data rooms, what prevents teams from fully understanding a project, and how better visibility earlier in the process could change how capital flows through the market. This episode is partner content. The conversation was recorded live as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum with CEARTscore. You can access the full video here. CEARTscore is building a platform to structure project data, surface risks earlier, and help developers, investors, and insurers make faster, more informed decisions. Learn more at ceart.io.

With electricity now the limiting factor in the race to build superintelligence, the tech industry's response has been very Silicon Valley: move fast, break things, and relentlessly scale. The result? An overtaxed grid, a wave of community pushback, and an obsession with jet engines, ship turbines, and small modular reactors that don’t solve today’s problems. In this live episode, recorded at the Transition-AI conference in San Francisco, we stress test three Silicon Valley mantras against the reality of what's happening to the grid.  First, “move fast and break things”: data center bans are spreading, communities are organizing, and the backlash is bipartisan. Is it too late to rebuild trust? Then, “first principles” thinking: data centers are going off-grid, jet engines are being bolted to trailers, and the grid is being treated as a hurdle to avoid. Why is this approach shortsighted? Finally, “10x better, not 10% better”: every hyperscaler has a moonshot, but very few have planning cycles that extend past three years. So are we missing a critical window to get creative? We’ll close with some audience ideas for creative solutions to the AI energy bottleneck. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com.

For a long time, natural gas was considered a bridge fuel. Even the gas industry called it a bridge, working hand in hand with environmental groups to push coal off the grid.  Then came the pushback over methane leaks, air quality in homes, and residential gas connections. The industry got so rattled it started hiring influencers to win back public opinion. Well, all that has changed radically. Who needs influencers when you have the tech companies who run the platforms? This month, Meta announced it would fund 10 natural gas power plants for a single AI campus in Louisiana totaling 7.5 gigawatts. Microsoft, Google, and Crusoe are all investing in gigawatts of new gas capacity. Utilities and independent power producers have tens of gigawatts more in their development pipelines.  Suddenly, this once-called bridge fuel is suddenly looking like a four-lane highway. This week, we dig into what's behind all these gas deals, what they mean for the power mix and emissions targets, and what an off-ramp could look like. We’ll look at the internal logic of the hyperscalers, the possible impacts on rates, and how the turbine crunch may impact development. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

America’s grid problems are often framed as physical constraints: equipment shortages, interconnection backlogs, and a lack of powered land. But are we missing an opportunity to bring bigger ideas to the table as we reindustrialize and electrify the economy? This week, Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, joins the show to talk about why our biggest constraint is an inability to plan, coordinate, and build at the scale this moment demands. On the left, there’s a growing push to limit demand through data center moratoriums and price controls. On the right, there’s a lot of talk about ratepayer protections and off-grid data centers without much thought to big-picture system planning. We don’t have a system that can align private capital, public priorities, and long-term infrastructure needs. So what would real coordination look like? We’ll talk about Jane’s new proposal seizing the data center buildout to support a grid infrastructure fund. We’ll talk about why the current debate about “utilization vs expansion” misses the point, and what it would take to coordinate a data center buildout for public benefit. Then, we’ll turn specifically to green groups. After spending years playing up electrification, why is the climate movement struggling to bring big deals to the table? And what does it mean to build durable political coalitions around climate? Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Anne Bailey, Sean Marquand, and Stephen Lacey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Open Circuit is brought to you by FlexGen, a leader in integrated battery energy storage solutions and energy management software. FlexGen helps owners and operators gain greater visibility and control across complex energy systems to maximize performance. Learn more at www.flexgen.com. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

For years, demand-side programs like energy efficiency and demand response were treated as compliance, not real resources.  Now, that’s changing. As electricity demand surges, utilities are facing a new reality: they can’t build infrastructure fast enough or affordably enough. So they’re starting to look in a different place for capacity: inside homes and businesses. In this episode, Stephen Lacey speaks with Hannah Bascom, chief growth officer at Uplight, about the rise of the “demand stack” — a framework for combining efficiency, dynamic pricing, and demand response into a coordinated resource for the grid. They also explore a new case study from Evergy, developed with the Brattle Group, which shows how integrating demand-side strategies can significantly expand peak reduction through better enrollment, forecasting, and customer engagement. Hannah traces how the industry evolved from compliance-driven efficiency programs to a world where distributed energy resources can deliver real, planning-grade capacity. And she explains why utilities are starting to take these resources more seriously as pressure on the grid intensifies. Learn more about how Uplight helps utilities unlock flexibility from distributed energy resources.

We’re entering an electricity supercycle that is reshaping how power gets built, where it gets built, and who controls it. Across the U.S., developers are scrambling to lock up land with access to electricity. And the century-old grid is being pushed in ways it wasn’t designed for. It’s also sparking a new debate about how exactly to modernize the grid. For all the talk of capacity scarcity, the system sits idle for much of the time. A new report from The Brattle Group suggests that better utilization of the existing system could unlock 100 gigawatts of capacity, while saving ratepayers tens of billions of dollars. But some are skeptical, saying the focus on utilization and distributed resources isn’t ambitious enough, and doesn’t solve the right problems. So, do we build our way out of this moment with more steel in the ground? Or do we use what we already have more efficiently and more flexibly? This week, Brian Janous of Cloverleaf Infrastructure joins the show to unpack the debate over grid utilization vs grid expansion. Plus, we do a vibes check on the most popular narratives in energy right now — from the revival of coal, to the promise of nuclear, to America’s ability to build. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Anne Bailey, Sean Marquand, and Stephen Lacey. Read our new white paper from Latitude Intelligence analyzing data center tariffs. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

Everyone has a strong opinion on energy right now. If you’ve followed energy for a while, none of this is new. There have always been strong opinions — renewables versus fossil fuels, subsidies versus markets, activists versus infrastructure. But the intensity feels different right now. People are arguing about everything: the speed of the transition, how to fix broken electricity markets, whether renewables raise or lower power prices, whether AI data centers are about to break the grid. So who’s actually right? This week, JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest joins the show to weigh in on some of the top fights in energy. Michael is the chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan Asset and Wealth Management. He writes the “Eye on the Market” newsletter, and every year he publishes a deep dive on energy market trends. This year’s report is called “Fighting Words.” We talk with Michael about the fallout from the war with Iran and why the global economy may absorb it differently than past crises. We also dig into gas markets, electricity prices, data centers, CCS, green hydrogen, and sustainable aviation fuels — and what they all reveal about the reality of today’s energy system. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Anne Bailey, Sean Marquand, and Stephen Lacey. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

President Trump’s war with Iran has rattled global energy markets. Oil prices have surged, LNG markets are tightening, and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply — has been severely disrupted. Tankers are stalled, shipping costs are soaring, and energy markets are bracing for one of the largest oil supply disruptions in history. The result: higher fuel prices, rising electricity costs, and a reminder of how vulnerable modern economies still are to fossil-fuel geopolitics. This week, we look at the wide-ranging impacts of the shock, from global oil and LNG markets to electricity prices and grid security. We’ll also ask the question: will this accelerate the shift toward clean, distributed energy or just push countries toward more coal? Or both? That leads us to a big idea that is getting a lot of attention: the “bring your own distributed capacity” model where large electricity customers help unlock grid headroom through demand response, efficiency, batteries, and other distributed resources. Guest co-host Julia Hamm joins us to talk about how the concept works, why it’s gaining traction among utilities and hyperscalers, and the pathway for distributed capacity to become a real solution to the grid’s growing constraints. Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.  Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

The politics of AI and electricity came to the White House this week. On Wednesday, the biggest tech companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle — gathered in Washington to sign what the administration is calling a “ratepayer protection pledge.” The promise: data centers will pay for their own power and grid integration costs. But is anything actually changing? Or is it just political theater? This week, we’ll look at the politics and intention of the announcement, along with some real-world models emerging for powering the AI economy. In Minnesota, Google is pulling together a package of renewables, long-duration storage, and distributed batteries for a planned data center.  In Mississippi, xAI continues to build unpermitted gas engines and explicitly flouting air quality regulations. And the Energy Department is also backing a grid modernization project that includes gas, nuclear, batteries, hydropower, and transmission upgrades.  Three models. Three very different bets on what the future of AI power looks like. Which one wins out? And more importantly, who pays? Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.  Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

When President Trump kicked off an aggressive trade war, a lot of people predicted economic doom. But it didn’t happen. We’re seeing something similar in clean energy right now with ever-shifting tariffs, half-written rules on foreign sourcing, and the weaponization of permitting. But capital hasn’t fled. In fact, it increased last year. So what is happening here? According to new market intelligence from the clean energy finance platform Crux, project finance, construction lending, and bridge lending all grew at a modest rate – with renewable electricity and batteries accounting for 80% of activity. This week, we’re going to take a look at where capital is leaning in, where it’s pulling back, and how new changes to tariffs and foreign sourcing rules will influence the market.  And then we’ll turn to solar and batteries, which are weathering the storm of uncertainty, but still facing plenty of turbulence. What’s driving that resilience? Want to watch this episode? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.  Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

This week, we’re featuring an episode of The Green Blueprint.  In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks with Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems. Cindy and her team at Sage Geosystems are developing geothermal technology that could revolutionize energy storage. Instead of pumping water up a mountain, they pump it deep into the earth, providing cost-effective, long-term storage for intermittent renewable sources.  They’re piloting this technology at a new commercial facility in partnership with  San Miguel Electric Cooperative, a rural Texas electric cooperative that is transitioning from coal to solar and battery storage thanks to a USDA grant.  Lara and Cindy talk about Sage’s groundbreaking new technology, its first commercial facility, and upcoming partnerships with geothermal giant Ormat Technologies.  If you are looking for more Open Circuit episodes to consume, subscribe to Latitude’s YouTube page.  Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on ⁠Apple⁠, ⁠Spotify⁠, ⁠Google⁠, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

This year alone, the biggest tech companies plan to spend more than $600 billion on physical infrastructure — eclipsing the railroad boom, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo space program. But are investors starting to flinch? This week, we examine the negative market reaction to tech earnings. Is Wall Street reacting to the infrastructure bottlenecks that stand in the way of building at that scale? Or are they worried about the tech industry’s approach to solving them? Then we turn to one of the boldest responses to those bottlenecks: space-based data centers. After SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI, Elon Musk says orbital computing powered by solar could be imminent. We unpack the arguments for and against space-based data centers. Then we look at solar. Musk says Tesla plans to build 100 gigawatts of domestic solar manufacturing capacity. Tesla has launched a new panel and mounting system that it claims will reduce installation time by 30%. At the same time, a new poll from Trump’s chief pollster shows majority support for solar among GOP voters — especially when panels are made in America. Is there a vibe shift underway? Ready to accelerate your career in clean energy? Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate is a fully online, 10-month program built for working professionals. It delivers real-world skills in clean energy policy, technology, project finance, and innovation — all in just five hours a week. Enroll here and use the discount code OpenCircuit26 on your application to save $500 on tuition. Applications close April 20, 2026. Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

2026 could be the year of the mega-IPO, with OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic all rumored to be eyeing public markets. But for energy nerds and hot-rock lovers, there’s another IPO to watch: Fervo Energy. With Fervo preparing for a long-anticipated IPO, the geothermal sector is heading into a moment of price discovery. It’s a test of whether next-generation geothermal has finally crossed a new commercialization threshold and becoming bankable, repeatable infrastructure. Over the past few years, over a billion dollars has flowed into geothermal startups, including Sage Geosystems, Zanskar, Quaise Energy, Eavor, XGS Energy, and Dandelion Energy. These companies are taking very different approaches — from enhanced geothermal systems and pressure-based designs to AI-driven exploration and ultra-deep drilling — but they’re all chasing the same prize: firm, clean power at scale. Meanwhile, geothermal developers are signing contracts and partnerships with large tech companies looking to power future data centers. And the industry’s ties to oil and gas drilling have given it political durability under the Trump administration. With this rare moment of alignment, can geothermal unlock a much larger pool of infrastructure capital? Later in the show, we ask a different but related infrastructure question: what happens to the fossil fuel system as demand declines? We discuss new research looking at how unmanaged decline could lead to price shocks, reliability risks, and political backlash if replacement infrastructure isn’t ready in time. Join Latitude Media on April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, a two-day, in-person conference on the digital and energy infrastructure buildout needed to support AI load growth. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠! Explore the new era of AI innovation in the fifth season of Where the Internet Lives, an award-winning podcast from Google and Latitude Studios. Follow and listen to Where the Internet Lives on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Electricity affordability has become the defining energy issue of 2026. As policymakers scramble for solutions, two very different playbooks are taking shape. On one side, a blunt-force federal approach led by the Trump Administration that treats affordability like an emergency. Keep coal plants open. Force markets to change. Make large power users pay directly for new power plants through market interventions. On the other, a quieter, asset-light strategy is emerging at the state level. In places like Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey, governors and legislatures are increasingly looking to virtual power plants to meet growing peaks and avoid overbuilding the grid. This week on Open Circuit, we break down these two paths. What actually lowers costs, and on what timelines? We start with the federal push to reshape PJM capacity markets and make big energy users pay for new supply. How would that actually work? Is it real market reform, or political signaling? Then we turn to the state level, where VPPs and distributed resources are increasingly central to affordability plans. We compare how Illinois, Virginia, and New Jersey are approaching the problem. Join Latitude Media, April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, our flagship event on the AI-energy infrastructure buildout. The two-day conference will bring together developers, utilities, regulators, and hyperscalers to align on what’s real, what’s possible, and what can get built to meet AI infrastructure demand. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

It’s been nearly a year since a national energy emergency was declared, with big promises on prices and reliability. So we’re asking a simple question: how’s that going? In this live episode of Open Circuit, recorded at the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, we take stock of a power system under growing strain. Outages are up, prices are up, markets are stressed, and grid reliability experts are warning of a “five-alarm fire.” We’ll start with a look at how accelerating load growth, tighter reserve margins, delayed interconnection, and extreme weather are colliding — and what breaks first if current planning assumptions don’t change. Then, we’re joined on stage by Wilson Rickerson, president and co-founder of Converge Strategies, to explore grid resilience through a national security lens. As the military increasingly depends on the civilian grid, what happens when that system is under sustained stress? Wilson explains why thinking about the grid in a wartime context leads to familiar priorities: flexibility, transmission expansion, regional markets, and better coordination. And we talk about a report from Converge on lessons from the grid at war. Join Latitude Media, April 13-14, in San Francisco for Transition-AI 2026, our flagship event on the AI-energy infrastructure buildout. The two-day conference will bring together developers, utilities, regulators, and hyperscalers to align on what’s real, what’s possible, and what can get built to meet AI infrastructure demand. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code PODS10. ⁠Register today here⁠!

Meta just unveiled the biggest-ever corporate deal for nuclear power. It’s a sprawling set of contracts for both existing plants and next-generation reactors that totals 6.6 gigawatts. Just a few years ago, the conversation in the U.S. was about which nuclear plants were going to shut down next. Now, some of the world’s largest technology companies are trying to lock them up under long-term contracts, while building new ones. But critics argue that parts of Meta’s deal don’t add new capacity fast enough — possibly pushing electricity prices even higher in an already-tight market. And that concern is suddenly political. This week, President Trump said tech companies need to pay their own way when it comes to electricity, signaling just how central data centers are to the national debate over affordability. This week, we have a breakdown of Meta’s nuclear push. We’ll look at what it means for power markets, how it compares to what the rest of the hyperscalers are doing, and whether this moment actually changes the future of advanced nuclear. Credits: Co-hosted by Stephen Lacey, Jigar Shah, and Caroline Golin. Produced and edited by Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

This is an episode with a lot of firsts: the first show of the year, the first full show on video, and the first with our new co-host, Caroline Golin. In 2026, we’re launching a new chapter for Open Circuit as we sharpen our focus on the physical constraints shaping the energy transition — exploding power demand, grids that can’t keep up, tech companies reshaping electricity markets in real time, and investors trying to figure it all out. This is no longer a conversation about whether clean energy can scale. It’s about whether the systems around it can move fast enough to support the next wave of industrial demand. To kick things off, we dig into some of the forces redefining the power sector: the fight over capacity, the rise of co-located and merchant power, the limits of data center flexibility, and what Alphabet’s acquisition of Intersect Power tells us about the race to buy power. We also officially introduce Caroline Golin as our new regular co-host. Caroline brings a unique perspective to Open Circuit: she spent the last seven years inside Google, where she served as global head of energy market development and innovation.  Caroline helped shape how Google procures electricity, engages utilities, and navigates capacity constraints across global markets. That experience puts her at the center of many of today’s most urgent questions around energy. Welcome to the new Open Circuit, where we decode how clean energy actually gets built. If you want to watch the episode, subscribe to the show on YouTube! With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

After more than 40 years in the energy industry, Katherine Hamilton is retiring. And that means she’s also retiring from the podcast after a decade behind the microphone. In this farewell episode, Katherine shares insights into a career that spanned one of the most transformative periods in energy history. We’ll reflect on her accidental entry into grid engineering at Dominion Virginia Power in the 1980s, where she learned to design distribution circuits, calculate load, and build early efficiency projects.  She talks about how those experiences gave her an intuitive grasp of how the grid works — a foundation that shaped her roles at NREL, in federal advocacy, in leading industry associations, and becoming a trusted policy voice in clean energy. We’re deeply grateful for the clarity and optimism Katherine brought to every conversation. Over the years, she helped listeners make sense of policy upheavals, market shifts, and the messy, unpredictable reality of the energy transition.  This is a chance for us to say thank you. Katherine was an incredibly effective translator for the clean energy industry, and we’re going to miss her deeply.  This is our final episode of the year, but we’ll be back in January with fresh episodes. Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

This year, the energy industry changed faster than we could talk about it. We collectively said more than 225,000 words on this show — some of them were informed takes, some speculation. So how did they age?  This week, Stephen reaches into a stocking stuffed with quotes from past episodes, and Jigar and Katherine must decide to defend, update, or disown their own words. Then, we honor the storylines and surprises that defined the year. The categories include:  The biggest plot twist The breakout star  The best villain  The most underrated storyline Finally, we look ahead and make one bold prediction for 2030. In a year of growth, uncertainty, and a bit of existential dread, join us for our recap of the last 12 months. Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card! Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.

Three years after ChatGPT ignited the AI race, the assumptions driving the trillion-dollar data-center boom are starting to shift. The belief that endlessly scaling large language models will unlock AGI — and justify unprecedented growth in electricity demand — is now being questioned by some of the field’s most influential voices. At the same time, utilities are planning roughly a trillion dollars in grid upgrades, much of it based on speculative data-center proposals and a still-evolving understanding of real load. In this episode, Stephen Lacey unpacks the growing tension between an AI industry defined by rapid iteration and a power system built on decades-long investment cycles. What does that mismatch mean for forecasting, financing, and resource planning? We then feature two conversations from Transition-AI Boston. Former FERC commissioner Allison Clements and Generate Capital’s Peter Nulsen explain why traditional planning signals no longer offer the certainty they once did. How do load uncertainty, short-term contracts, and sequencing challenges reshape the risk profile for new energy projects? In the second discussion, Mike Kramer of Constellation, Dawn Owens of Fervo Energy, and Sam Simmons of Form Energy explore whether AI-driven load will create meaningful demand signals for clean, firm technologies like geothermal, advanced nuclear, and multi-day storage. What will determine if they gain a real foothold? We will soon be opening registration for Transition-AI 2026 in San Francisco. More details here. Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

This year in energy has had the vibes of a dysfunctional family gathering: everyone showed up with big feelings, and no one agreed on the menu. To celebrate Thanksgiving, we’re processing the chaos right at the dinner table. In this holiday special, the team matches classic Thanksgiving guest archetypes with the biggest energy storylines of 2025. Who is the drunk uncle sucking up all the oxygen in the room? Who is the pragmatic parent holding the family together? And who is the rebellious teenager threatening to upend the status quo? But first, we serve an appetizer of the week’s biggest news: a new analysis from Grid Strategies shows that projected peak load growth has quadrupled in just two years to 166 GW. And we’ll wrap with leftovers — the unfinished stories we’ll be sharing well into next year. Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card! Nextracker is now Nextpower. As electricity demand surges with AI, data centers and electrified infrastructure, solar is the only power source that can scale fast enough to meet this moment. Nextpower is the technology platform built for this future, delivering connected systems that unify the structural, electrical and digital technologies of a solar power plant. Powering what’s next at Nextpower.com.  Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

Utilities are facing a collision of pressures: extreme weather, rising load, affordability concerns, and growing regulatory friction. Everyone agrees the grid needs to be hardened. But the real question is: how much resilience should we pay for? On one side, utilities are confronting unprecedented stress from storms, wildfires, flooding, and heat. On the other, they’re under pressure from regulators and customers to keep rates down — even as costs spike from inflation, supply chain delays, and long-overdue modernization. The Edison Electric Institute estimates that utilities are planning about a trillion dollars in grid investment by 2030. But how much of that is truly focused on resilience? And how do we balance the need for those investments with all the other cost pressures hitting the system? This week, we’re joined by Julia Hamm, a partner with the Ad Hoc Group, to break down where resilience fits in. We look at how utilities justify resilience spending, how regulators are responding, and why so much of the debate comes down to defining the line between reliability, resilience, and routine maintenance. Then we widen the lens to the emerging resilience-tech market, a growing ecosystem of startups focused on wildfire detection, predictive weather analytics, vegetation management, sensors, and advanced grid modeling. We explore how these technologies could help utilities target investments and turn resilience into opportunity rather than pure cost. Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 gift card! Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

After Bill Gates dropped a new climate manifesto, the internet did what it always does: lost its mind. Conservatives claimed victory, progressives accused him of selling out, and somewhere in the middle was a real debate about how the energy transition actually happens. This week, in our episode recorded live at Greentown Labs, we’re jumping into the fray. What does the debate say about the state of climate tech in 2025? We’ll start with a look at the debate over Bill Gates’ latest letter on climate impacts, philanthropy, and tech progress. Why does he obsess over innovation while ignoring the systems that help solutions scale? Then we turn to the so-called “new normal” for climate tech capital. Venture investment is thawing, public markets have rebounded, and infrastructure money is pouring into the sector. What does that mean for startups? Finally, we end with a little thought experiment about what history will remember us for. Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

Here’s something surprising: in states like North Dakota and Texas, the surge of new industrial and data center load has actually moderated electricity prices. The very thing many people blame for higher power bills has, in some cases, had the opposite effect. According to a new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, load growth has slightly lowered retail electricity prices on average over the past five years. So what’s really driving them up? The answer isn’t renewables or AI. The study finds that generation costs are down 35% since 2005, but transmission costs have tripled and distribution costs have more than doubled. Billions are now being spent to upgrade the grid and harden it against extreme weather. This week, we’re joined by guest co-host Caroline Golin to unpack the new data. We’ll discuss what’s driving those infrastructure costs, why utility spending remains so opaque, and what could happen over the next five years as large loads multiply. Later in the show, we’ll talk about a new proposal from Energy Secretary Chris Wright to accelerate the interconnection of large loads with onsite generation or flexibility capabilities. The proposal could speed up data center projects, but also risks triggering a new clash between federal and state regulators over reliability, costs, and control. Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com.With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

After years of U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductors, Beijing is fighting back by cutting off exports of the raw materials that make those chips possible: rare earths, graphite, gallium, germanium — the invisible ingredients inside motors, power electronics, defense systems, and data centers. The move caught Washington off guard. The Treasury Secretary compared it to “pointing a bazooka at the industrial base of the entire free world.” These minerals only make up hundreds of millions of dollars worth of imports, but their strategic value is enormous. They’re woven into every emerging industry the U.S. hopes to dominate. And that’s the point. Under China’s new export rules, foreign companies will need government approval to trade or process these materials, giving Beijing leverage over the supply chains that feed both clean energy and artificial intelligence. In this episode, we look at the impact of China’s restrictions. And we also ask: is the AI war really an energy war? If you zoom out, this isn’t just a chip war or a minerals dispute — it’s a systems war. America has been pouring billions into digital intelligence, while China has been focusing on the “electric stack” that brings enormous strategic economic value. The electric stack is the vertically-integrated network of mining, refining, manufacturing, and grid infrastructure that underpins both the emerging electricity-based economy. China has spent decades mastering it. In the second half of the episode, we unpack an essay from Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico that argues America is playing the wrong game. Are we overestimating the value of artificial intelligence and underestimating the electric infrastructure that intelligence runs on? Resources discussed in this episode:  The Electric Slide by Packy McCormick & Sam D’Amico Mastering the Electro Tech stack by Noah Smith The Electrotech Revolution report from Ember The Electro-Industrial Stack from Andreessen Horowitz NYT: China’s Rare Earth Restrictions Aim to Beat the U.S. at Its Own Game Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

The AI economy isn’t coming. It’s already here. In the first half of 2025, investment in AI infrastructure outpaced all U.S. consumer spending. Tech companies are now building the equivalent of an Apollo program every ten months, while data centers are drawing capital away from nearly every other sector. As money floods into chips, servers, and substations, the “B word” is suddenly on everyone’s lips: bubble. This week, Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View and one of the sharpest analysts of exponential technologies, joins Open Circuit to unpack the difference between a boom and a bubble. Azeem discusses his recent analysis on bubble dynamics, which established a dashboard for monitoring the health of the AI economy. Azeem has spent the last decade chronicling how exponential technologies collide with the real world. And lately, that collision has been literal. Data centers are running into grid limits, power supply is the new bottleneck, and trillions in capital expenditures are reshaping capital flows across the economy. Scott Clavenna, Latitude Media CEO and lead author of the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter, also joins as guest co-host to draw from his experience covering the telecom bubble of the 90s. So where is this cycle headed? What’s on the other side of it? And what happens when exponential technologies hit the limits of steel, concrete, and electrons? In this episode, we’ll check the gauges of the AI economy, and ask what it means for the energy economy. Plus, we examine the state of AI, if we’ll ever see energy’s AlphaFold moment, and whether we’re seeing the limits of computing scale. Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!

Distributed energy resources have never looked stronger. Fleets of batteries are now performing like gas plants, virtual power plants are dispatched daily, and hyperscalers are supporting new models to finance capacity around their data centers. But investor-owned utilities? The Edison Electric Institute says they’re planning more than a trillion dollars in new infrastructure over the next decade to support historic load growth — with no mention of DERs or flexibility as solutions. So which world are we living in? The one where DERs become essential infrastructure, or the one where they remain a rounding error for utilities? This week, we examine this critical moment for distributed resources. Tim Hade, a co-founder of Brightfield Infrastructure and former COO of Scale Microgrids, joins us to talk about the tug-of-war at the heart of the grid transition.  We unpack a recent historical overview of DERs from Andy Lubershane, who argues that technical innovation and the desperate rush to meet load growth is turning them from nice-to-have experiments into distributed capacity resources that grid operators can actually count on. We also dig into EEI’s new report on utility planning, and examine why utilities still resist DERs even as customers and data centers push them forward. What are the consequences of ignoring them at this precarious moment when power prices are rising quickly? Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. Natural Power specializes in renewable energy consulting and engineering, supporting wind, solar, and battery storage projects from concept through financing. Discover how we're creating a world powered by renewable energy at naturalpower.com. With resilience now a leading driver of grid investments, Latitude Media and The Ad Hoc Group are hosting the Power Resilience Forum in Houston, Texas on January 21-23, 2026. Utilities, regulators, innovators, and investors will all be in the room — talking about how to keep the grid running in this new era of heatwaves, wildfires, and storms. Register today here!